Window on Eurasia: Shaimiyev Rejects Proposal that He Lead New Union of Muslims of Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 3 – Mintimir Shaimiyev, the former president of Tatarstan, praised the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate for creating a new Union of Muslims of Russia to oppose extremism and promote inter-religious understanding but turned down an offer that he assume leadership of this organization, citing his lack of expertise on Islam.

            Both Shaimiyev’s praise and his refusal to become the leader of the group were reported by Interfax yesterday (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=48692). Specifically, the former Tatarstan head said that he was “certain” that such a group would serve to unite all of Russian Islam against extremism and Wahhabism.”

            But he said that his current work as head of the republic foundation promoting the restoration of historical and cultural monuments and his “own insufficient preparation on the problems of Islam” precluded his being able to assume a leadership role in the new all-Russian Muslim organization.

            Behind this exchange are at least three more fundamental factors at work.  First, the new organization is clearly the latest effort by Talgat Tadjuddin, the head of the Ufa-based Central MSD who styles himself “the Supreme Mufti of Holy Rus” but is sometimes referred to be his opponents as the “drunken” mufti because of his alcohol use, to assume leadership of the entire Russian umma.

Because of his ambition, Tadjuddin has not had easy relations with other Muslim leaders or with the heads of Muslim majority republics like Tatarstan. Shaimiyev almost certainly refused not because of a lack of knowledge of Islam but precisely because he did not want to help Tadjuddin in his quest. 

Second, there have long been tensions between Tatarstan which Shaimiyev headed and Bashkortostan where Tadjuddin has his base. Tadjuddin generally has had the support of Bashkir leaders – indeed, President Rustem Khamitov praised the mufti this month – but perhaps precisely because of this, Tatar leaders have been more cautious in their assessments (www.info-islam.ru/publ/statji/v_ufe_sostojalsja_ix_sezd_cdum_rossii_foto/5-1-0-17940).

                Tensions between the two Middle Volga Turkic Muslim republics have been promoted by Moscow – the division of these two peoples in 1920 was Stalin’s first act of ethnic engineering – and today are pushed by pro-Moscow analysts who support a policy of divide and conquer.  The politically astute Shaimiyev would not want to fall into a trap by accepting.

            And third – and this is far and away the most important consideration – Tadjuddin both at the recent Ninth Congress of the Central MSD and more generally has gone out of his way to attack the much-ballyhooed spread of Islamist extremism in Tatarstan and to call for draconian measures to stamp it out.

            On the one hand, Shaimiyev has repeatedly said that extremism among the Tatars is not nearly as extensive as Moscow and Tadjuddin have claimed.  (The former president could hardly do otherwise without opening himself and his numerous allies in Kazan to attack and without putting the future status of his republic at risk.)

            Consequently, Shaimiyev turned Tadjuddin down, seeing the latter’s offer as a kind of poison chalice and, by rejecting it, likely guaranteeing that this latest move by the Central MSD head will end as have many of his campaigns in the past, with a great deal of media play and an equally small amount of actual change.

Window on Eurasia: Andropov Wanted to Do Away with National Republics, Journalist Says, and Putin Would Like to But Can’t

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 2 – Yuri Andropov, the KGB head who became CPSU General Secretary in 1982, wanted to do away with the ethno-territorial division of the country as part of a more general plan to undermine the entrenched nomenklatura and introduce radical economic reforms, according to a Moscow journalist.

            In an article published today in “Russkiy reporter,” Dmitry Kartsev says that Andropov’s plan, about which there have been many rumors but which he documents on the basis of interviews with Andropov’s associates, is what Vladimir Putin would like to do but lacks the power to carry through (www.rusrep.ru/article/2012/10/31/kgb).

            An assistant to the late KGB General Vladimir Kryuchkov said Andropov’s program as was like that of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, one in which “the representative of a force group, who operating on this force group by non-democratic means, that is without public discussion, introduces a complex of unpopular modernizing transformations directed at the Westernization of the country.”

            That is what Andropov wanted, and that is what Putin is doing as far as he is able.  “All of [Putin’s] key reforms … have taken place without real public discussion. And note,” the former KGB aide says, “they all are absolutely liberal.”  But he continues, the current president’s powers are “very limited” by other power blocks in Moscow.

            In the view of the aide, Putin “has secured the maximul level of Westeernization to which the force elite would agree and which in its turn secures the carrying out of modernization. This is Andropov’s plan, only without the GULA and without civil war. But [precisely for those reasons], the effect is not so impressive.”

            Kartsev’s 4200-word article provides details on many aspects of Andropov’s plan and the way in which it has been realized, at least in part. Some of the most intriguing of these are the following:

            First, Kryuchkov’s aide said that “the present Russian opposition does not understand one thing.” It does not recognize that it will dispense with its call for honest elections as soon as the people vote against liberal reforms.  Then, because its members believe more in liberal reforms than in democracy, “they [will] cry again “Give us Pinochet!” and that will happen again.

            Second, Gennady Gudkov, the former Duma deputy who earlier served in the KGB, said that Andropov’s plan was “was prepared already in 1965” but was ignored by the Politburo.  For the times, he said, Andropov’s plan was “quite radical” but it may have been developed “over the course of 20 years.”

            Third, Kartsev points, one of the few statements about the plan that have been published that reflect direct contact with Andropov was that of Arkady Volsky,who said that Andropov foresaw “the introduction for several years of a harsh, almost Stalinist dictatorship” because of the opposition he knew his liberal reforms would generate.

            Andropov had “an idee fixe,” Volsky said: he wanted “to liquidate” the ethno-territorial divisions of the USSR.  He told his aides that they needed to “draw a new map of the USSR,” one that would dispense with the non-Russian republics.  They brought him 15 different plans, but Andropov was not pleased with any of them.

            Third, destroying the national republics would have been destroying much of the party nomenklatura, and so, one retired KGB general told Kartsev, “the activity of all parties in the country would have been banned” – and in the Soviet context, that meant the banning of the CPSU through the elimination of Article 6 of the USSR Constitution.

            Fourth, in place of the republics, Andropov wanted to create ten competing economic zones, the best of which would guide the country as a whole and overcome the degradation of the system more generally, much as the Chinese have done, according to several people with whom Kartsev spoke. 

            Fifth, to run these zones, a former KGB officer said, Andropov knew he had to find “new people,” “professionals,” and for that he looked to certain officers in his own organization and to others who, even if they did not recognize what they were doing and were not recruited as such, were prepared to work with the KGB in this direction.

            Sixth, Andropov’s radicalism, his decision to pursue “an ultra-liberal” policy by authoritarian means reflected what was “fashionable” in the mid-1980s – Reaganism and Thatcherism,” Kartsev’s KGB interlocutors said. There was the alternative of “Swedish socialism, “but we did not want to be Sweden.”

            Seventh, to prepare for this transformation, the former KGB officers say, “certain major functionaries, mostly from the KGB itself, began” to keep the earnings of Soviet export sales abroad in offshore accounts so that they would be able to invest in the new companies in the USSR and then Russia itself.

            Eighth, many in the KGB though Andropov was a utopian.  The former aide to Kryuchkov, for example, said that “the problem with the Andropov Plan is that it in general would lead to civil war.”  The population would oppose it, and who “would defend” the system in that event?

            Ninth, in the early 1990s, a former KGB officer said, “Andropov’s heirs made a temporary tactical compromise with the party bureaucracy … agreeing to give it part of the property and practically all political power in exchange for the chance to appoint a group of ‘its own oligarchs.” But this compromise did not last.

            “Of course,” Kartsev concludes, “with the coming to power of Vladimir Putin, power did not pass to the KGB.” Instead, his small group often found itself in opposition to “the corporation of the chekists as a whole. More than that, with the coming to power of former KGB officers, the intra-corporate struggle intensified sharply.”

Window on Eurasia: Non-Russians Block Kremlin on Regional Amalgamation and ‘Russian Dominance’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 1 – Representatives of the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation, under the leadership of Tatarstan, this week spoke out against the Kremlin’s plans to restart Vladimir Putin’s regional amalgamation program and to legally institutionalize “Russian cultural dominance” in the country.

            At a meeting of the working group preparing the Nationality Policy Strategy document on Monday, they blocked the Kremlin on both points, and as a result, the draft that emerged is “a paper monster,” whose impact will depend on whether the Russian government will fund it, according to Moscow commentator Oleg Gorbunov (politcom.ru/14763.html).

            While the non-Russians appear to have taken the lead in blocking the inclusion of language calling for state support of Russian cultural “dominance,” the Politcom.ru writer suggests, they were joined by representatives of predominantly ethnic Russian regions in opposing a restart for Vladimir Putin’s regional amalgamation plans.

            Those plans, launched in Putin’s first term, were quietly put on hold when Dmitry Medvedev was president.  And as a result, Gorbunov says, “the formation of the federal districts which informally unite subjects of the Federation into macro-districts did not reach its logical conclusion” in terms of intra-state borders.

             One of the reasons for this outcome, he notes, is that wealthy regions did not want to be weighted down by poorer ones. But another is that with the restoration of elections for regional heads, the latter “understood that they are becoming ever more independent from the center on the political plane.”

            That is especially the case in non-Russian regions in the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus, Gorbunov writes, and “their elites fear that amalgamation would lead to attempts to take from them their special national status” and that its loss would lead to a change in their “budgetary relations with the center.”

            Thus, the commentator concludes, with this document, “the federal center has not been able to resolve its main task” but instead has been limited to “the preservation of the current unstable balance among the various nationalities,” with neither the non-Russians nor the Russian nationalists getting the kind of support they want.

            The Kremlin “bureaucrats,” he writes, “prefer to move back and forth among various ideological trends, not giving any one of them priority” for long.  But “the growth of national self-consciousness of ‘the generation of the 1990s’ in the national republics is leading to the radicalization of the general political situation … and to the appearance of local but still unregistered ethno-national parties.”

                This factor is manifesting itself in public only “from time to time” now, Gorbunov observes, but “already by the next parliamentary elections in 2016, it could become a factor of the political struggle” that the Kremlin will have no choice but to take even more seriously than it does now.

                But there are reasons to believe the situation may heat up far sooner than that.  Today’s “Izvestiya” reports that Duma deputy Aleksey Zhuravlev has called for the development of a “treaty” among all the nationalities living in Russia and its adoption by a country-wide referendum (izvestia.ru/news/538838).

            The preparation of such a document after the approval of the Nationalities Policy Strategy document by Vladimir Putin in December in itself would spark more debates about the direction the country should take and a referendum would almost certainly exacerbate the situation still further.

            In addition to the ideas mentioned above, this debate, “Izvestiya” suggests, would include controversies over whether to prevent any reference to ethnicity in media reporting about crime and migration, the restoration of the nationality line in Russian passports, and the creation of a Ministry for Nationality Affairs and the establishment of a plenipotentiary for nationality issues.

           

Window on Eurasia: Makhchakala’s Call for City-Level Druzhinniki Units Certain to Exacerbate Ethnic Tensions in Daghestan

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 1 – Daghestani President Magomedsalam Magomedov has issued a decree calling on officials in the cities there to set up druzhinniki units to aid law enforcement.  But if any of them do so, that step almost certainly will exacerbate ethnic tensions and further destabilize Russia’s most multi-ethnic republic.

            Magomedov’s plan, which has attracted more attention this week since he talked about it at a meeting with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev, almost certainly was based on the appearance of such groups in neighboring Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov (u-f.ru/News/magomedov-magomedsalam-magomedalievich/647351).

            In Chechnya, these units, which have proved themselves in practice subordinate to no one, have helped build Kadyrov’s authoritarian and arbitrary regime in a republic which is ethnically homogenous.  But in Daghestan, where no nationality forms a majority and where there are more than 30 different indigenous nations, the situation is very different.

            The creation of such druzhinniki almost certainly would follow ethnic lines and that in turn would give each mayor or district head his own “legal armed force,” something he would be far more likely to use to promote himself and his specific ethnic group than to ensure that Daghestani laws, let alone Russian ones were enforced.

            In reporting this idea, the F.ru news portal asked rhetorically, “just how great is the probability that the ‘local druzhinniki’ of Daghestan will go along that path of development? Will it not turn out that the [already] unsettled republic will hand over plenipotentiary power into the hands of legalized armed formations?”

            And those questions lead to another, not asked by F.ru: will the existence of such “legalized” force structures merge with rather than oppose the growing number of anti-regime militants not just in the rural areas of Daghestan but increasingly in the urban areas of that republic as well?